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Had a great gig Friday night at the Dragonhorn, and and just had to share a bit with the guys here who might relate.
The company that makes my guitar rig (Fractal Audio) recently released yet another firmware, and this one was another big leap in tone. Without going into too much detail, the Fractal unit models the circuitry of nearly 300 different guitar amps (and a couple thousand speaker cabinets), and Cliff, the inventor of the unit keeps coming up with refinements to his algorithms. Lately he's been on a tear, coming up with new ideas faster than I can try them out. On our last gig a month ago, I was using firmware 8.0. Friday night, I was running v10.2. And yesterday he released the beta version of 11.0.
Throughout the gig, our other guitarist (who only plays acoustic guitar) kept telling me my tone was killing it. Lots of other friends who've heard us a lot also said the band sounded better than ever. I was loving it, too...getting sustain and controlled feedback like never before. But best of all was when my friend James Wood, who recently retired as Alice Cooper's head live sound engineer said not only was the band mix on point, but my guitar tones were great.
To top it off, one of my old guitar teachers (who I've not seen in 35 years or so) showed up at the gig, and his presence inspired my playing to another level. He's the guy who got me my first teaching job years ago. This teacher was also my buddy Tim Pierce's first teacher, and we had a good laugh remembering how he almost gave up on Tim because he just didn't have the knack for playing guitar. Bad sense of rhythm, couldn't tune his guitar, and just didn't seem to have much potential. Then Tim went away for a summer, practiced his butt off, and came back blazing. To those of you who don't know who Tim Pierce is, here's a list of some of the artists he's recorded with:
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tim-pierce-mn0000593316/credits
The company that makes my guitar rig (Fractal Audio) recently released yet another firmware, and this one was another big leap in tone. Without going into too much detail, the Fractal unit models the circuitry of nearly 300 different guitar amps (and a couple thousand speaker cabinets), and Cliff, the inventor of the unit keeps coming up with refinements to his algorithms. Lately he's been on a tear, coming up with new ideas faster than I can try them out. On our last gig a month ago, I was using firmware 8.0. Friday night, I was running v10.2. And yesterday he released the beta version of 11.0.
Throughout the gig, our other guitarist (who only plays acoustic guitar) kept telling me my tone was killing it. Lots of other friends who've heard us a lot also said the band sounded better than ever. I was loving it, too...getting sustain and controlled feedback like never before. But best of all was when my friend James Wood, who recently retired as Alice Cooper's head live sound engineer said not only was the band mix on point, but my guitar tones were great.
To top it off, one of my old guitar teachers (who I've not seen in 35 years or so) showed up at the gig, and his presence inspired my playing to another level. He's the guy who got me my first teaching job years ago. This teacher was also my buddy Tim Pierce's first teacher, and we had a good laugh remembering how he almost gave up on Tim because he just didn't have the knack for playing guitar. Bad sense of rhythm, couldn't tune his guitar, and just didn't seem to have much potential. Then Tim went away for a summer, practiced his butt off, and came back blazing. To those of you who don't know who Tim Pierce is, here's a list of some of the artists he's recorded with:
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tim-pierce-mn0000593316/credits